Fun and Games with the Kgb

As the Pentagon supposedly tried to deceive the Soviets with rigged Star Wars tests in the sky, the FBI attempted to fool the KGB on the ground -- sometimes with comic contortions. In his new book, The FBI (Pocket Books), Ronald Kessler, a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post, tells of an operation against a Washington-based KGB officer who was trying to recruit a Pentagon employee. As the Soviet official slept, FBI agents stole his car to plant a bug in it. To avoid suspicion, they put an identical car in the official's parking space overnight. They also made sure that the replacement odometer's mileage read exactly the same as that of the real car. Meanwhile, the KGB car's odometer was temporarily removed to keep it from registering miles the Soviet would not be able to account for. Within three hours, the FBI was done and the cars were switched again. In the bugged car were a microphone and a tape recorder, which would be activated when the Soviet agent got into the driver's seat. What would the FBI do if the machine ran out of tape? An agent would walk up to the car, undo the taillight reflector, and replace the tape every few days. However, no arrests were made because the KGB's Pentagon target never responded to the Soviet's overtures.

Kessler also details another elaborate plan, in which high-tech devices were planted in the headrests of KGB cars. These would trigger sensors at specific intersections in Washington, allowing the bureau to keep track of KGB movements without recourse to machines that required replacement tapes or batteries. One car did not have a headrest, so agents planted the device in the glove compartment. When the car was brought in for a regular inspection, KGB mechanics found the bug and quickly inspected other vehicles for similar spy paraphernalia. By then the FBI had infiltrated 20 cars. The KGB removed every single bit of buggery. According to Kessler, the cost to the U.S. was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The most explosive contention of Kessler's book is that in the U.S. hundreds of Americans, perhaps more than a thousand, worked for the KGB during the last years of the cold war. The FBI's source was a highly credible former KGB employee. Writes Kessler: "The break came just when FBI counterintelligence officials had concluded rather smugly that the end of the cold war had brought no great surprises about the degree to which the KGB had penetrated American secrets." He adds, "So specific was the information that the FBI was quickly able to establish the source's credibility." Among the spies, says Kessler, were "military men who had had top-secret information and officials of other agencies." The cases, he writes, are "enough to keep ((the FBI's intelligence division)) busy into the next century."

Sources familiar with the case have told TIME that the former Soviet informant, who used to work for the first directorate of the KGB, defected about a year ago. But they say Kessler's figures are "highly exaggerated." The defector did have access to hundreds of names, but they included both Americans and non-Americans and were drawn from both KGB and Warsaw Pact files. More important, the great majority were innocent contacts. Only about a dozen cases of suspected espionage originating with this particular defector are being investigated by the FBI.